ii4 Handel and Music
strikingly like.Handel in the face, and not only should she
have been such an incomparable renderer of Handel's music
—I cannot think that I shall ever again hear any one who
seemed to have the spirit of Handel's music so thoroughly
penetrating his or her whole being—but that she should have
been struck with paralysis at, so far as I can remember, the
same age that Handel was. Handel was struck in 1737 when
he was 53 years old, but happily recovered. I forget Madame
Patey's exact age, but it was somewhere about this.
Handel and Shakespeare
Jones and I had been listening to Gaetano Meo's girls
playing Handel and were talking about him and Shakespeare,
and how those two men can alike stir us more than any one
else can. Neither were self-conscious in production, but
when the thing had come out Shakespeare looks at it and
wonders, whereas Handel takes it as a matter of course.
A Yankee Handelian
I only ever met one American who seemed to like and
understand Handel. How far he did so in reality I do not
know, but inter alia he said that Handel " struck ile with
the Messiah'' and that " it panned out well, the Messiah
did."
Waste
Handel and Shakespeare have left us the best that any
have left us; yet, in spite of this, how much of their lives
was wasted. Fancy Handel expending himself upon the
Moabites and Ammonites, or even the Jews themselves,
year after year, as he did in the fulness of his power; and
fancy what we might have had from Shakespeare if he had
gossipped to us about himself and his times and the people
he met in London and at Stratford-on-Avon instead of writing
some of what he did write. Nevertheless we have the men,
seen through their work notwithstanding their subjects, who
stand and live to us. It is the figure of Handel as a man,
and of Shakespeare as a man, which we value even more than